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Martian Tree (The Sea of Stars)
The martian tree consists of a rigid stem and a flexible feather-like structure over the stem, some over three meters high, a third of a meter wide, and over half a tonne. They ingest obsidian crabs as well as are photosynthetic. The martian tree has a red trunk that forms its lower half, while leaves are colored to make the top portion appear orange-red.The trunk is about a centimeter thick and made of a material that is like cartilage. Even though it looks like a plant, the martian tree is a bacterial colony that retracts its leaves in the night to keep them from freezing. The barrier between the necrotoxin and the rest of the colony is made up of specialized cells whose sole purpose is to be resistant to the necrotoxin. Evolution The martian tree came from a mutualistic relationship of photosynthesizing and heterotrophic bacteria that had mycelium to leach nutrients. Neither the photosynthesizing nor heterotrophic bacteria could live on their own because there simply was not enough food for either to survive. Because of this consequence, the photosynthetic and heterotrophic bacteria grew together from the beginning. However, even with the bacteria working together, many of these colonies died through an absence of methanogenic bacteria nearby, or the receding North Ocean. Finally, a mutation happened in the proto-tree that allowed the heterotrophic bacteria to produce very toxic waste products to pool on top of it. The rest of the martian tree's history is just improving on what has already been done and growing to be one organism. Even though the martian tree began as two different kinds of bacteria, at the end of the Tertiary Eon, the tree was a superorganism of over forty different varieties of cells. Biology Diet The leaves contain phycoerythrin to absorb sunlight. The center of the martian tree is home to a necrotoxin that digests small animals like obsidian crabs. Crabs move in swarms and are social; they also follow other crabs' chemical trails. The necrotoxin smells like their chemical trails, so the crabs climb over the martian trees and eventually fall into the soupy substance in the center of the tree. The substance decomposes the crab until it reaches the crabs' constituent nutrients, and then absorbs the nutrients through its mycelium. Ecology The martian tree clears out much of the obsidian crabs, which would otherwise overrun everything in the tropics. Also, martian trees do not stress the environment too much because they collect sunlight using phycoerythrin. When the martian tree dies, it would be a home to Spoonbeaks. Eventually, even the Spoonbeak leaves because there simply are too many organisms breaking the martian tree down. Predators The woodflesh worm is a parasite who feasts on the martian tree's cartilaginous skin and squirts formic acid into the flesh of the martian tree, slowly destroying the cells and the worm digs deeper into the tree. Featherworms love a different part of the tree: the leaves. They make a web into the feathers while eating them and, because every martian organism is asexual, it only takes one to reproduce to fell a tree. The featherworms gradually eat every leaf on the tree, but because the tree needs the leaves to live, the tree eventually dies. Range This plant grows in forests with the sceptretrees, near the equator from three billion to one billion years ago.Category:The Sea of Stars